Hippolyte Taine

French writer

• Born: April 21, 1828
• Birthplace: Vouziers, France
• Died: March 5, 1893
• Place of death: Paris, France

As a critic and historian of the arts and society, Taine dominated much of the intellectual life in France in the last half of the nineteenth century. His work was influential in England and the United States, but much of his history and literary theory fell into disrepute during the twentieth century. However, his method and his appreciation of literary works continue to engage critics and historians.

Early Life

Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine (tehn) was twelve years old when his father, an established attorney, died. Left with a modest inheritance and scholarly inclinations, the young man was sent to a boarding school in Paris. He loved learning and soon revealed a mind superior to both his fellow students and his teachers. Deeply influenced by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, Taine had lost his religious faith by the age of fifteen. He took a naturalistic view of the world, in which the human intellect and nature are viewed as parts of a single process. History, if it was examined carefully, revealed a total structure that functioned on the same principles as nature. Consequently, societies grew and declined in an organic manner, as did natural phenomena, and the historian or philosopher could find the laws of society, history, literature, or any human endeavor in the same way that scientists found such laws to operate in nature.

It was Taine’s devotion to Spinoza that led to his failing the agrégation (a series of examinations at the École Normale Supérieure) in 1851. His conservative examiners found his elucidation of Spinoza’s moral system to be “absurd.” In effect, Taine was flouting their most fundamental conceptions about free will and morality, for he argued that human beings were largely the products of their race, their time, and their environment. Taine seemed to attack the concept of individuality and of moral responsibility, apparently abandoning the notion that human beings created their own world in favor of a belief in determinism.

If Taine’s early academic career was hampered by his unorthodox views, his lectures on literature and art soon brought him attention both in France and abroad. He was the harbinger of the great naturalistic novelists of the nineteenth century such as Émile Zola, who took as their subject matter the way a culture shapes human character. Taine was one of the first men of letters to study science rigorously and to develop a human psychology based on his courses in physiology, botany, zoology, and anatomy. His work was greeted with enormous enthusiasm, because it promised to put the study of history, literature, and culture as a whole on an objective basis and free it from the arbitrary prejudices of the critic.

Life’s Work

The publication of Taine’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863-1864; History of English Literature , 1871) solidified his reputation as the leading philosophical critic of his age. Rather than simply present summary descriptions of the great English authors’ lives and works, Taine propounded the notion that English literary history was not solely the record of individual achievements. Rather, it had a shape and a structure that could be elucidated, so that each author became a part of a tradition and could be seen as the product of his environment and his age. Literature was no more an accident, or merely the manifestation of an individual mind, than were the elements of nature.

In collections of essays and lectures in the next ten years and in his travels across Europe, Taine promoted a methodology based, he believed, on the rigor of scientific principles. In a lecture on the nature of art (first given in Paris in 1864 and published in English translation in 1875), Taine established the rules of his method. According to Taine, one must first study the artist’s body of work and become familiar with the artist’s characteristic themes and techniques. Then one must examine the artistic tradition out of which the artist develops, taking note of how the artist’s work is illustrative of that tradition. Finally, it is necessary to explore the social climate, the intellectual influences, the race, the language, and the customs of the world the artist inhabits. Taken in total, this method, in Taine’s view, yields a comprehensive, unbiased view of art.

Taine’s view of art is historical: “Arts appear and disappear along with certain accompanying social and intellectual conditions,” he asserts in his lecture on the nature of art. The implication of his argument is that artistic genius is an intensified example of environmental influences. The artist is the finest expression of the whole culture but not a creation unto himself. All that makes William Shakespeare distinctive can be found in his contemporaries, Taine argues, but only Shakespeare expresses the exquisite combination and modulation of those elements that make a great artist. Returning to science as his guiding principle, Taine concludes: “The productions of the human mind, like those of animated nature, can only be explained by their milieu.” Such a statement, in his estimation, was a law he had discovered in his study of art, not an idea he foisted upon it. He offers his readers “facts,” for science “imposes no precepts, but ascertains and verifies laws.”

It must be remembered that Taine was writing at a time when eminent Victorian figures such as Thomas Carlyle were advancing a “great man” theory of history. The legacy of Romanticism had been to exult in individualism and to see society coalescing about the figures of extraordinary men. On the contrary, Taine contends, a writer such as Honoré de Balzac is great precisely because he creates a literature of characters who typify their times, their culture, and their race. Balzac’s La Comédie humaine (1829-1848; The Human Comedy, 1885-1893, 1896), his series of novels on French life, are the best history of his era because he is so attuned to the way in which his characters are manifestations of their society. Similarly, Stendhal repays study because he is so intimately aware of how individual psychology is linked to the history of his times. His characters are motivated by historical conditions; there is a logic to their imaginations that springs from their milieu.

In the last twenty years of his life, Taine shifted from an interest in art and philosophy to the writing of a history of contemporary France. Never deeply engaged by political issues, he nevertheless felt the need (given his historical frame of mind) to discover the roots of his culture. Because he believed that societies grow organically, and thus that individuals and events are all connected to one another, he devised a multivolume history beginning with the ancien régime (the era before the revolution) and ending in his own day.

The French Revolution bothered Taine because it seemed more like a disruption than a continuation of history. The year 1789 was when France was radically changed from a society that evolved from a tradition to a new country that established a government according to universal, abstract principles. Taine did not believe that such principles existed, except insofar as they might be seen evolving in history. His profoundly conservative cast of mind could not allow for a catastrophic event that suddenly transforms the structure of a society. In his view, such an upheaval is doomed to failure.

Taine is not nostalgic about the past. Indeed his history of France documents the desperate situation of the people in the twenty-five years preceding the revolution. He does not deny the need for change, but he deplores the anarchy and violence of the revolution. Napoleon I restored order but at the cost of destroying liberty among various social classes. Having to deal with the failed revolutions of his own time (the upheaval of 1848, the Paris Commune of 1871), Taine was not sanguine about the way his countrymen effected change. His rather vague solution was to counsel a sympathetic understanding of the place of all classes and elements of society.

Significance

Except for his literary essays, Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine is little read in the twenty-first century. His notions of science are outdated and suspect, and he is unable to see that the vaunted objectivity of his methodology is no such thing. When Taine’s history of France is examined, it is clear that it is as subjective and determined by his biases as any other history would be. Taine would not have been surprised by this judgment, because he believed that human beings were the products of their times. However, he did fail to see the contradictions in his own methodology, that his brand of conservatism was temperamental and could not be explained only in terms of his time, place, and tradition.

It has been noted that Taine’s reputation since his death has steadily declined. However, subsequent critics and historians owe Taine an enormous debt. For example, Taine reversed the excesses of Romanticism, with its lionizing of the individual, and perceived important facts about the relationship between the individual and society that naturalistic novelists explored with considerable brilliance. Nearly every critic who has covered the subjects and the periods that were at Taine’s command has felt compelled to deal with his ideas—if only to refute them. Finally, Taine merits study as one of the last men of letters who tried to integrate his insights into many different fields of study: psychology, literary criticism, aesthetics, art, philosophy, and history. In an era of specialization, his work is still an admirable example of the effort to grasp intellectual life in its entirety.

Bibliography

Eustis, Alvin A. Hippolyte Taine and the Classical Genius. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951. A well-written scholarly monograph that concentrates on Taine’s debt to classical writers and scholarship. Information is presented succinctly and judiciously. The bibliography remains useful.

Gargan, Edward T., ed. Introduction to The Origins of Contemporary France, by Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Gargan’s long introduction provides important biographical information on Taine and a shrewd analysis of his position as a historian.

Kahn, Sholom J. Science and Aesthetic Judgement: A Study in Taine’s Critical Method. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953. An important monograph for specialists, this book will prove somewhat difficult for students not already familiar with several of Taine’s texts. Nevertheless, this is an essential study of Taine’s philosophy and methodology.

Nias, Hilary. The Artificial Self: The Psychology of Hippolyte Taine. Oxford, England: Legenda, 1999. Drawing on Taine’s unpublished manuscripts and letters, Nias characterizes Taine as a model European intellectual of the second half of the nineteenth century. She describes how Taine was influenced by Darwinism, new scientific discoveries, and Impressionism to acquire a self-disgusted, tentative, and ironic mentality, similar to the mentality he described in his psychological writings.

Weinstein, Leo. Hippolyte Taine. Boston: Twayne, 1972. The only comprehensive introduction in English to Taine’s life and work. Chapters on his life, philosophy, method, and psychology; career as a literary and art critic; and role as a historian of France give a thorough summary and critique of Taine’s achievements and influence. Notes, an annotated bibliography, and an index make this an indispensable study.

Wellek, René. A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950. Vol. 4. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965. One of the most important sources for tracing the history of literary criticism and Taine’s place within it. Wellek discusses the significance of Taine’s History of English Literature and the way the critic deals with matters of style.